Every once in a while, one of Greg Leger’s Roto-Rooter crews arrive to find a home turned into a scene of nightmarish destruction.

The toilets have backed up. The yard has turned into a septic field. And the home’s sewage pipe, incredibly, has almost completely dissolved.

The pipe is “just mush,” said Leger, operations manager for Ontario Roto-Rooter.

“We have to get a pump truck out to vacuum out all the sewage from the front lawn — just an absolute mess.”

We have to get a pump truck out to vacuum out all the sewage from the front lawn — just an absolute mess

And as the homeowner sees their yard and garden attacked by entrenching equipment, there is little comfort for why this has happened. Because, for a couple decades after the Second World War, Canada thought it would be a good idea to install sewer pipes made out of cardboard.

Thousands of kilometres of pipe. Hundreds of thousands of homes. The pipe once trumpeted as a home-building miracle has done millions upon millions of dollars in damage, and remains a ticking time bomb for unsuspecting residents across Canada.

In Waterloo, Ont. alone, city surveys found that 100,000 homes had the pipes, which are made of a kind of papier mache strengthened with tar. Guelph, Ont., plumber Paul Neville said he has “too much experience” with the uniquely fragile design. In 2011, Edmonton estimated that it will cost a total of $1.8 billion to replace the city’s vast stock of the material.

The technical term is “coal tar-impregnated wood fibre,” although many builders knew it as “Orangeburg pipe,” due its primary maker, the Orangeburg Manufacturing Co. But in Canada it was also referred by the soon-to-be-ironic title of “No-Corrode.”

In the 1940s to 1950s it was a godsend to a continent short of metal after the war — and desperate to put up as many homes as possible to house the baby boom.

“The rationale at the time was just to get these houses built as cheaply as possible,” said Paul Neville, the service manager for Guelph’s Cornerstone Plumbing Solutions.

Naturally, North America’s love affair with the pipe made millions for the companies who had figured out how to turn wood pulp into plumbing infrastructure. At the height of the boom, in 1956, the Orangeburg Manufacturing Co. had sales equivalent to $140 million today.

Ads for the company from the time boasted that they had put “300 million feet” into service — enough to twice encircle the globe.

But then, starting in the 1990s, the Orangeburgs started to fail. After decades underground, the wood fibre pipes started to flatten into ovals. Standing water turned the outer walls soggy, allowing sewage-hungry plant roots to punch through.

Then, drain-clearing bits sent down to clear the roots only ended up tearing apart the pipe itself.

“It literally starts to rip like cardboard,” said Leger.

As pipes fell apart and thousands of toilets began simultaneously flushing to basement sinks, municipalities across Canada gradually realized they had a multi-million dollar crisis on their hands.

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Cornwall, Ont., passed a bylaw effectively banning the pipe from city limits: If somebody spots it underground, it needs to be removed immediately.

In 2005, Halifax Council drafted a city-wide “No-Corrode” replacement strategy, knowing full well that each passing day risked another round of flooding brought about by a pancaked pipe.

Waterloo, in 1994, took on the Herculean task of replacing the city’s 100,000 wood-fibre sewer pipes — an endeavor that was estimated at the time to cost $650 million.

Mark Knight, a professor of engineering at the University of Waterloo, was tasked to study the mysterious pipe on which the city had declared war. His conclusion, after testing on dozens of No-Corrode samples, was that Waterloo’s post-war plumbing systems were undone by dishwashers.

“They were doing quite well until we started putting really hot water down there,” he said.

It’s why Knight, more than most, is careful not to blame the builders of the past for burdening future generations with sewer pipes that wouldn’t even reach the end of the century.

Schladweiler the sewer historian is similarly forgiving to the postwar apostles of Orangeburg pipe.

Plenty of building materials don’t make it past their 50th birthday, but only Orangeburg has the unloved distinction of filling basements with sewage when it reaches the end.

Thirty years ago, Alberta was cursed by thousands of pine shake roofs that rotted in only five years — versus the promised 25. Houses across the western world were torched by electrical fires after being outfitted with aluminum wires in the 1960s. And of course, uncountable Canadians never reached old age because of lead pipe or lead paint.

“Generally, everything that man makes, sooner or later, is going to wear out — it’s just a question of when,” said Schladweiler.

Plumbers contacted for this story expressed a unanimous conviction that modern plumbing technology has outgrown the mistakes of the Orangeburg past. Plastic pipes are “bombproof,” and few building codes will allow a building material so clearly ill-equipped to outlive the workers who installed it.

But Schladweiler’s not so sure.

“Forty years from now, somebody is going to look back and say ‘why the hell did they do that?’”

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